The winding road from laboratory to surgery through academic, clinical  and Industrial partnerships

Advances in medical imaging can lead to improvements in clinical practice and patient treatment. Nuclear medicine is a long-established physics based clinical specialty, that has benefited from improved imaging technologies. We will discuss how an academic and clinical partnership transformed instrumentation originally developed for imaging in X-ray astronomy by the University of Leicester, for use in portable hand-held hybrid imaging in the nuclear medicine clinics at Nottingham University Hospitals. The long journey from the research laboratory to the operating theatre presented many challenges including funding, licencing, regulatory and ethical requirements.

• Multidisciplinary collaborations were essential for the success of the project.
• The ups, downs, trials and tribulations, setbacks and successes will be discussed.
• Advances were based on trust, scrutiny and determination.

The final imaging technology was further exploited with commercial investment which led to clinical use in the United States and finally to the operating theatre for breast surgery at the University of Malaya Medical Centre in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.